Family of Four
by Masamune's Song
Summary: The two mothers of Aeris Gainsborough and what she means to them.


Response Fic to Ardwynna M's "The Wait."

I'm planning on doing a second chapter for this . . . eventually. Until then the title doesn't make much sense.

Standard disclaimer about not owning anything FFVII.

* * *

She would have been four years old now. Nearly five.

She would have had brown hair, his hair. And his laugh.

Nothing else of his, though.

_Babe, babe, we can't do this now. All I need is just one more break, and then I'll make it up to you. We'll get that new car you liked, get a beach house out on Costa del Sol. You can have six kids if that's what you want . . ._

Under the plate, the night is eternal, and Elmyra walked beneath the streetlights, stepping from darkness to light, darkness to light, like stepping beneath little nights and days spinning their way into years.

Five years. Could it really have been that much time? That little?

He had said he would be there forever.

_Yeah, baby, I'm sad about it, too, but we're so close now, we can't get bogged down with kid shit, you know? And I'm not just talking about diapers- Phew! I mean, how are you going to keep your job with a baby? And what about me? I'm going to be somebody. Dickie says Shinra's looking for talent like mine. You know I can't show up to a gig with a baby. I can't sit around making goo-goo faces, cleaning up piss and shit, when I'm supposed to be working on my songs with the guys. _

Elmyra called her Haddy Maria.

There were times when Haddy felt so close, so real, it seemed like everything else was the illusion. A glimpse of a pigtailed girl sitting in a truck bed that left Elmyra staring after her. A feeling of a presence that made her turn around. Dreams.

Time had made these moments come less frequently, and she never talked about them with anyone. But when she worked so late that the trains all but stopped running, or when sleep could not find her, she went out into the streets and walked. And walked. She told herself she was not looking for Haddy.

That night, though, she had been in the company shower, washing off after another day in the factory, when- sudden and unbidden- Haddy was there. A four-year-old girl, sitting on her haunches in a field of flowers, her back to Elmyra, sun gold on her brown hair-squatting, rising, pushing her way away through the knee-deep flowers, clear as any vision from heaven. Elmyra did not have time to call after her before she was once again standing naked in the shower, one hand pressed against the tiled wall for support.

Some of the water running down the drain was salt.

_Tell you what, you know that money I was saving for my new guitar? I'll give it to you so you can go to the clinic and get it done right. I don't want my girl using some cheap trash pill that probably gives you cancer or makes you sterile or some shit._

Shiftless slum rat. As if he would have had any money at all if it weren't for her feeding him, supporting him, working her tail off, all so he could sit around drinking with his music buddies.

All so he could tell her he didn't want the baby.

Stupid slum girl, sitting there and nodding, nodding, willing herself to believe him, even though her father had promised he was going to stay forever, too. Stupid slum girl who was always agreeing with boys, agreeing with them, until she got the reputation of being cheap, being easy.

She never told him that she had not gone to the clinic.

She did it herself, with one of those cheap trash pills, in an old condemned building where no one would care if she tore up the floorboards to bury her blood in real earth.

She hadn't wanted to break down crying in one of those clinics. She hadn't wanted some stranger's latex covered hands to be the only hands her baby ever felt. Haddy Maria was born so small Elmyra almost didn't see her in all the blood, even though she was looking. She was smaller than a hen's egg, with tiny perfect eyelids and tiny fingernails on her hands, and hair like a wet chick's feathers.

She lived seven minutes.

Elmyra knew, on some level, that she was also burying her love for the overgrown boy who would not be a father, burying her ability to believe in his golden dreams, burying her own youth.

Afterwards, as she limped away, she could not help but turn and look back. She hadn't really noticed or cared what the old shell of a building looked like, but it was a church, and when the morning light hit it- real sunlight from above the plate- it was blasphemously beautiful.

* * *

Blood.

So much. Too much.

_Hush, hush, my girl. I've got you. I've got you. My big girl. My big, heavy girl._

But she had to stop talking because she knew the sound of her own voice was frightening, even to her own ears. Wheezing and harsh and strange. The sound of someone dying.

Her grip on Aeris grew tighter, more mechanical, as more blood left her.

_I'm out of time . . ._

The bullet had only grazed her ribs. Nothing but a warning shot, really.

But the experiments that had come before left her weak, turned her blood to water and her skin to paper. She was not bleeding from the gunshot so much as dissolving. She suspected that Shinra meant to offer her a carefully meted out cure, that she would have to beg him for, selling out Gaia's mako secrets that she did not know, and would not give him if she did.

Her vision was blurring, and the strangers' faces turning away from her were featureless blobs. She knew that the years in the white and sunless labyrinth of the lab left her and her daughter's skin weirdly luminous, like cave dwelling lizards, and Ifalna knew they repelled people with the smell of basement and sterilizer and mako-made monster.

Aeris was clinging to her neck, crying soundlessly in the way that she had learned in the lab.

She knew.

Ifalna knew that she knew, but she still said:

_Just a little farther. We'll make it. We'll make it. And then we'll be out of the city. Out of Midgar. You'll like it there . . ._

She was all but blind now. Her voice rang loud in her ears. She did not feel like she was slowing, so much as the train platform was getting farther and farther away.

For all the time she had had to dream of escape, the actual escape had gone very clumsily, and wouldn't have taken place at all if the other kid in the lab- the unnatural one with silver hair- hadn't helped. She was not sure if he had done it out of kindness, or a desire to see them get themselves killed.

She had had a vague notion of getting out through the sewer system. Getting out of Midgar. Going someplace with sun and flowers.

But the wound changed everything. She could feel the lifestream pushing her toward the train depot. Not, she knew, as an escape route. Even at her most optimistic, she could see how impossible that was. Shinra had eyes on every train that entered or left. And a reward would be out for her. Someone would be bound to remember the blood-soaked woman and child who looked as if they'd crawled out of a hole.

And even if they did make it onto a train, and no one spotted them, Shinra would be waiting at every stop in every direction. That would mean they'd have to jump off. And, even without the injury, in her current condition, there would be no way for her to survive the-

She took a step . . . and the ground was not there to meet her foot.

She turned as she fell, keeping Aeris' weight above her, taking the impact on her shoulder.

She heard something crack.

She lay stunned for a moment, not breathing, and then the pain exploded inside her, so intense she could do nothing more than gasp. She lay, writhing like a fish, with Aeris still clamped around her, gripping her tight.

_Have to get up. Have to keep-_

She did not even know what she was looking for. Death was coming, death was _here_, and she did not even know what she was fighting to find.

The white blur was stretching, brightening, turning to the color of mako. She had always been aware of the lifestream in ways that the humans were not. She was used to seeing it as a glimmer of green here and there, brighter in materia. But now it was a shining tide, sweeping her out and away. Aeris, she knew, could not see the lifestream, but she must be aware of it because she clung to even harder as the ghosts pulled at their hair and clothes.

Ifalna choked, and Aeris abruptly let go of her neck and looked her mother in the face.

Ifalna tried to say something, but blood bubbled up from her lips, and she gave up when she realized she was spattering her little girl.

Aeris brushed the tears out of her eyes and then said firmly, "Hush, now, Mother. Don't try to talk."

That was when Ifalna started to cry.

_Oh, my girl. My beautiful girl. I'm so sorry to do this to you. I didn't want you to grow up so fast, not like this. Not like this. I wanted to give you something- words, at least, before I go. I never wanted you to watch me die._

It was hard to keep her eyes open, and she did not even know if she had done the right thing in coming here to this exposed train station in a part of town so rough that no one would stop to help a woman and child bleeding to death on the street.

And then she saw it.

Through the blurry fog of pain she saw- a woman, running toward them beneath the streetlights, her face flashing between darkness and light.

It was someone with a hole in her where a child should be. The one person in all the city whose need was great enough that she would not see the Ifalna and Aeris as escaped experiments, would not care about the danger of hiding a little girl from Shinra. Someone who needed Aeris. Someone who would love her little girl in fitful paroxysms, alternately smothering and inadequate.

It was a mother.


End file.
